Free The Information Officer by Mark Mills

to guilt, to the secret he knew he could never share with anyone. He soon came to realize that he was wrong, though. It couldn’t be guilt, because he felt no guilt for what he had done. He was able to play those last moments of his father’s life over and over again in his head and they stirred nothing in him, neither shame nor satisfaction. In fact, he barely recognized himself in the small slice of cinema. It could just as well have been another fourteen-year-old boy sitting in the passenger seat of the swanky new roadster hurtling down the country lane.
    His father was always buying new cars, fast cars. They fit with his “work hard, play hard” ethic, and he drove them hard, pushing them to their limits. When they disappointed him, which they invariably did, he simply replaced them. It had been a Saturday morning in early August and they’d been heading for a race meeting at Brooklands motor course. The events at Brooklands drew a rich crowd, an international crowd, and his father liked to gather there with his friends. Wives and daughters rarely showed their faces. Sons were permitted on the understanding that they were neither seen nor heard. This was fine by the sons, who congregated in front of the green-domed clubhouse before making for one of the circuit’s massive banked curves, where they would spend the remainder of the day sneaking cigarettes in the long grass and silently praying for one of the drivers to misjudge the camber and go hurtling over the edge.
    That’s what should have happened that day, what would have happened if he hadn’t reached out a hand and opened the glove compartment of his father’s new car. He was used to his father’s sudden jungle furies, used to being screamed at for some minor misdemeanor. He wasn’t used to being slapped across the cheek. He knew that his father struck his mother, he had seen the bruises on her, but he had always been spared such treatment. Until now. He didn’t cry—he knew that if he cried he was truly done for—but his father saw thetears moistening his eyes, and that was enough. The words cut deeper than they ever had before, and the shouts increased in volume, competing with the roar of the wind and the scream of the engine.
    That’s when he did it. Even now, he couldn’t say what he had hoped to achieve. He certainly didn’t pause to weigh the consequences. It was a purely instinctual reaction. He lunged for the steering wheel and yanked it toward him. The last thing he remembered before the world went black was his hand, pale and hairless beside his father’s on the polished perfection of the wooden steering wheel.
    His father died instantly when the roadster wrapped itself around the tree. Some curious law of physics chose to throw him clear at the moment of impact. All this he discovered some days later, when he came to in the hospital. His head was heavily bandaged, but everything else was intact—externally, at least, which was all the doctors cared about. They used the words “coma” and “miracle” a lot. His mother barely spoke. She did what she was supposed to do. She put on her widow’s weeds and consoled her damaged son. But he knew what she was really thinking; he knew she was struggling to come to terms with her liberation. He saw her in a new light, clear and crisp and cold, a winter light. And it wasn’t just her. He saw everything in this new and unfamiliar light.
    Others must have detected something in him, because they started to remark on his behavior. His mother said it was grief. The doctors put it down to shock. One doctor, young and eager to please his superiors, prattled on about some recent case studies of frontal lobe trauma. Apparently there was evidence to suggest an association between a blow to the front of the head and a diminution in the subject’s ability to feel emotion. Words such as “emotion” didn’t sit happily with the consultants, and the young doctor learned a valuable lesson: it’s only a